


Under the skin

by Lavender_Seaglass



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Female Mage Hawke - Freeform, breech birth, fever trip across thedas, post-Inquisition, pregnancy fic, spoilers for II and kind of for Inquisition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 01:39:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5438741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavender_Seaglass/pseuds/Lavender_Seaglass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After all that she's been through, Hawke doesn't plan on going anywhere else, let alone leaving him behind. This is, however, not something she's sure how to face. Doing things is easy; it's the regrets that kill you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. a.

**Author's Note:**

> i am like years late but man this pairing hurts

i.

Around the table she can see many familiar faces. There are many more than she ever would have guessed, for all the years she spent saving her city, for all the years she spent with close companions who shared with her the most tumultuous years of their lives, there are so many who have departed. Some of these faces did leave for a time, like she did, and have returned, like she did, drawn back to Kirkwall by the obligations and opportunities created by thousands remaining homeless and a still-ravaged infrastructure. And some had never left—Aveline, Donnic, Charade, Gamlen, Merrill, all constant citizens, Orana who never wavered in her duties. She, Hawke, is grateful for that. More than for her loyalty Hawke also knows she owes her elven friend a profound debt of gratitude for preserving two families' legacies from looters and the indignities of dust and time and losing a carefully polished shine.

Sitting amongst those of them who always stayed are Varric and Isabela. They are both smiling. Maybe it could be said that the years have been kind to them, or at least kinder to them than to the rest of Kirkwall, this Viscount and this prosperous captain, but she didn't invite her friends over to pass judgement on them whether silently or not. The two of them are smiling and engaged in the game of Wicked Grace going on before them. Hawke thinks to herself vaguely about the luck that surrounds her at this very moment, so she tilts her head towards her sensitive chest, and smiles, lightly, so only she notices her tiny moment of gross fondness. She places her hand on the table next to a stack of sovereigns she's added to her apparently ever-increasing fortune. The cloth with which Orana has covered the table is smooth beneath her spread fingers; if she sniffs, she can catch a whiff of lavender and wind.

But she is wrong, if she thinks that she is the only one who has witnessed this brief but sweet shift in her condition.

Besides her _he_ shifts. A tiny movement in him, too, a twitch of long slim fingers holding a not-so-bad set of cards he would gladly set down, a kind of unconscious preparation in anticipation of brushing his hand against her for the thousandth time this day.

Before he can look at her, however, she covers his hand with hers, and they do not need to look at each other. She smiles until she feels the wrinkles sprouting around her eyes; she can also feel the tightening around his mouth that he would prefer to hide even amongst such well-loved company. And even though there are surely a novel thousand and one ways he'd like to touch her itching under his fingertips.

With a roll of her shoulders she stretches out fully against the support offered by the back of her chair. It is a relief to have any weight off her pelvis and she sighs gratefully. If she could she would cross her ankles. Instead for now she presses her fingers in between his, tilts her head again, and turns her attention towards him to take in the soft glow of his satisfied—increasingly so, as the date draws nearer—countenance in profile. She doesn't need to, but she has ended up looking at him anyway.

They are close enough that, if he wanted to, he could lift both their hands and place them on the prominent swell of her stomach. He is as ever by her side. The distance between them is negligible but there at least and to be maintained while the others are present.

From across the game they are playing Hawke sees that Varric catches the sight of them in this moment. He would, of course, he has a writer's eye. She's sure Fenris is aware of this too but she's also sure that he doesn't care because he's proud to soon be a father. Strange, but it's true—fate or chance or his own actions have along with hers delivered them to this cusp of inevitable new direction to their future together.

Then, when something unexpected happens, he is there supporting her with one hand under her elbow before she herself understands completely that she should be standing up.

“Oh,” she says, looking down. Everyone is looking too. The chair is wet beneath her, the stain is creeping coldly up her robe, and the excess is now noisily puddling on the floor for lack of any other sound in the large silent grand room. This is how the dam bursts.

“Well,” Isabela says. “I guess that means one less week of having to watch you waddle around.”

“Typical of a Hawke to do things in their own way,” Aveline says with the show of a sigh.

Hawke smiles, but she does not say anything, not at first, for a few seconds she's too concerned to even quip. Everyone is looking at her, Fenris too, and he's the one whom she looks at when she's ready. He knows the answer to what the others are most likely wondering—has she been concealing her contractions up till now? Amazing, but not out of character, if she has.

The answer is simple: she hasn't. His fingers are tight around her arm and strengthened by a living love that has had many years of both natural and tended growth; health is evident in its sturdiness and surety, though if ever vivisected, evidence of their trials and weaknesses could be read easily from the variations and oddities in the grain.

She looks into his eyes and sees the faint faltering she expected but cannot feel in the composed pressure of his hand. He does not waver, that's not what this is about, but she knows the signs of his fears and—what he always wishes, prays to be—irrational anxieties. Though she has helped him hope he is too familiar with his own life to fully believe that such a desired thing could be delivered to him in perfect safety. These are some of his many doubts she's suspected from the very first time her weeks of puzzling illness turned into a potential promise. A tentative one, to start with, for they had not made any kind of mutual agreement yet, but there was a dazzling possibility on offer.

He'd said yes, decided to work out his swelling inchoate worries later when she wasn't biting her lip and trying to pace out of his reach to wait for a measured response. She'd come nearer to him after his answer and received what he could offer and didn't demand or ask for anything more than what he was capable of giving just then. As always. She'd given him his space and what he needed and in the early days that had sometimes been a night-long walk while she slept fitfully or shallowly or not at all and catalogued every single crack she could find in the ageing walls of her quiet ancestral estate.

And then he'd always come back before the dawn. He would crawl in beside her amongst their satin sheets, carrying with him wafting whiffs of the sea, wrap his arms around her, lay his hands over her stomach in a manner that was protective of two. This was when she felt him truly stake his ineluctable claim. His claim, his choice, his willing contribution to the history of the Hawkes and the Amells.

After that they had talked often in the future tense.

It seems that this, like the rest of the pregnancy, is not meant to be an easy labour. So it's fitting. A week early, but somehow he's still grateful for all of this. Something good is still coming his way.

 

.

 

Only it's not that simple. Of course not, nothing ever is, not for her, simplicity is not something that ever happens upon her and only very rarely upon him.

Merrill listens against Hawke's stomach with her superbly sensitive ears—which Hawke often thinks would surely hear better the Maker if there had ever been one to speak—and hears evidence of a very grave complication. She swallows, pulls up, and is about to say something when Fenris has already volunteered to go and fetch the specific midwife they spent careful weeks selecting. She's in Lowtown and not the most expensive but she is to them the most desired, for her decades of experience with every imaginable complication, in any possible circumstance, is beyond value. Wisdom is not something that can be trained.

“Stay here,” he says, and he gives Merrill a look like he hasn't in many years. The sharpness of his brow threatens more than the tone of his command; Hawke is here with them, and he has only very seldom upset her with the way he chooses to use his voice; even now he can manage such a level of restraint for her sake. “Don't leave her side.”

To Hawke he says, “I will be back soon”. He clenches her hands in his and could crush her knuckles if he weren't always so careful with her. His hands are trembling and that's so unlike him. Normally so controlled, so tight, so conscious and cautious. A part of him surely blames himself so she grabs his hands just as hard to reassure him that no, it's her body that's responsible for this disaster, with all its foibles and shortcomings and inconvenient failings.

A part of her thinks that this is what she gets for doing this past an age that would be responsible. Another part thinks that this is what she deserves because of all that she is.

She kisses his knuckles and twines her fingers with his. “We'll be waiting.”

And they will all have to, all of them, mother, child, attendee, and friends who have remained, none of them have any idea how to proceed with the knowledge that this is going to be a breech birth they'e facing.

As Fenris departs from their home, she swears that she sees him shudder a sickly pale-blue.

.

“Merrill?”

“Yes, Hawke?”

“If you call our child a half-breed, even in your thoughts, I'll know.”

“Oh, dear. Why don't we take another lap around the room? Maybe that will help your contractions begin. I don't believe you've even started to dilate.”

“I mean it.”

“I know, my friend. So do I.”

There is nothing else she can say.

 

**…**

 

ii.

“Are you certain,” the wizened woman asks as she removes her coat. She has been ushered in so quickly even diligent Orana was not able to observe basic courtesies to this most-honoured guest.

“What do you think about it?” Hawke asks, already knowing the answer. It's one that she wants for an array of reasons. She is bent over the back of a chair and pushing, pushing, straining herself into a stress that should be coming. Sweat already has dampened and flattened her hair against the shape of her skull. “What should I do?”

Imagine, for their revered Champion to ask someone like her such a question.

The old woman laughs and the sound comes from somewhere deep but dry, a chasm from somewhere forsaken like the farthest reaches of the Anderfels. It's impressive acoustics worth commenting on, if only Hawke had the mental resources to muster the concentration required for a response beyond a curve in one eyebrow and a vague sense of wonder that's quickly lost in her roiling sea of sensations.

The midwife is here now to steady her. “You're right,” the woman says, now setting down a great leather bag and gesturing over to Merrill without looking for a response. A profound reordering of structure has already begun to settle on the room: even the stones are attentive to whatever direction this woman may give. The midwife approaches Hawke and Hawke obediently straightens herself up without having to be asked or even gestured at. Someone is here who _knows_  and that's enough to spread a sense of purpose through a relieved osmosis.

“You're right, it's better if he's not here. Those who know nothing can't be of any help. If you can't contribute you can only detract.”

“This is—this is my first time, you know,” Hawke says as she allows herself to be led to her own bed by a woman who doesn't even reach up to her shoulders. This stranger is guiding her through what should be a familiar space.

“Well, maybe you have an instinct. A lot of woman do. Also, you know, it's your own damned body pushing it out. I'd say that counts for something.”

She reaches into her bag for something and she offers it to Hawke. Hawke can't be sure what it is. It's evening already, so the light is low enough even with hearty fire Orana built for her, and sometime in the last few minutes Merrill has drawn the curtains and drapes and created a deep darkness.

“For the pain,” the midwife explains. “Not to remove it, of course, and you can't have it until I'm sure your labour has actually begun. But it will help if it lasts too long.”

Hawke has to slow down her mind to process what exactly is being said to her. Her thoughts are beginning to become boggy—hot as she is, flighty as her fingers feel around the impossibly solid glass, she is thickening and bloating and something unutterable is coalescing deep within her where her child should be.

“I—“ Even this close she cannot make out the colour of the woman's eyes. Or the features to confirm she's actually a human. What nonsense—she's not an elf or a Qunari, she saw the woman in broad daylight so she _should_ remember. But she thinks now instead about the fact that when an accident occurs you can be choked to death by your very own tongue. “Why are you giving this to me?”

It is fear which is stirring, heavily, in the bottom of her stomach.

“It's your decision. I remember what you told me. You want no regrets.”

Had she said that? It is, Hawke thinks, something that she could and would say. She can almost imagine herself staying back after one of the visits she made with Fenris. Just for a moment or two, the few vital seconds she would need to convey a simple enough instruction, but one which Fenris might not understand, or might want to understand, or understand too well for her to ever quite look him in the eye. Almost she can imagine this scenario—she just isn't sure if she'd actually ever be able to go through with such a blatant betrayal.

She clenches the bottle in her hand and sinks into the mattress she has shared with him since the very first night they returned two years ago, together, to the city where they'd met and used to have something they now reckoned as a life. Though what was left when they'd arrived were just the remains of it. The important thing was that they were alive with one another. His hidey-hole was long gone and he hadn't needed to ask. Her bed has always been open to him. Whenever he wanted, he could have. And he did, in the end, take her up on everything she'd ever offered him.

No, she thinks, then says, “No, I don't. Tell him to remain outside. Tell him it's not waiting, after all it's not like I'm leaving him. I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying right here. I just have to take care of this.”

“Good girl,” the midwife says, and places her hand on Hawke's strong shoulder. “I'll take a quick look at you, and then we can take some nice turns around this lovely room of yours. You'll be done with your labour in no time.”

 

.

 

But it takes some time, and then more time. Twelve hours and a dawn later she's already tired.

Thirty-six hours later, without guile, she slips away in a slick of her own sweat. It's hot. Too hot. She can't stand the inferno raging across every centimetre of her flesh.

 

**...**


	2. b.

 

iii.

Hawke finds herself in Kirkwall. The idea of this is a little odd, but it's amusing, and it's not the reason why she feels that something essential is _wrong_  with the way things are now. Many things have changed. Nothing's the same. Something is missing. But what it is, exactly, she experiences it like a puzzle, a series of ever-tightening tangling knots encircling her stomach, which she must solve, now, if she wants to have any chance of accomplishing anything else good in her life. There are some other things which she has accomplished, all in the past. There's a lot in the past that she has done but none of it is very much related to what she has to do now—that is the feeling that she has, nestled neatly under the fragile flexure of her ribs. And this feeling has a fluttering heartbeat of its own, going once, twice, who are you, who are you, who are you, who.

“That's a good question,” she says at some point.

When Hawke wants to move it suddenly strikes her that it must be summer in Kirkwall. She's overwhelmed by a sultry heat that blossoms harshly into painful red splotches on her skin. Her clothing is soaked through with her own fluids and she wants to be naked but her clothes remain stubbornly on, encrusted on her body like a hateful layer of dead barnacles—mouldy leathers, damp fur, molten metal, clinging cloth, chainmail which squelches, how could her armour be so overwhelming? She hates it so much she wants to scream but not even her most visceral animal voice can convey, or cease, this stifling of her essential self.

Who is she?

Someone dying on a heady Kirkwall night. She rips at herself until her nails finally catch on her armour and waft away to blissful freedom in the sea, somehow she has made it to the docks. Her blood now flows and it is beautiful. She has a thought about the inexorable cycling of seasons but that's a comfort for which she has neither the patience nor the luxury. She is hot and dying now. The assured relief of fall or winter or spring isn't something she has time for.

She wants to jump and knows that there is no point in bothering. The water will cover her but not get under her skin which is where she needs it. But she can bleed and bleed and bleed and in this there is some relief as the furnace is drained of its fuel. All that will be left of her are brittle bones and a breath of smoke, a much more compelling way to go than to chokedamp.

.

It's not a familiar sun which warms her now. This she understands without having to look up. Humidity in Kirkwall may be oppressive but it's not a killer, it's not lethal in the same way desiccation and dehydration threatened her when she trudged with others through the sprawling scarred landscape of the Western Approach.

Such an arid place. Where it wasn't hard for anyone to believe that a Blight _could_ be as bad as was recounted down the generations by the once-living, as limned by vast stretches of infected world such as this one. Parts of Ferelden had been left fallow by their own recent bout of Blight but a luxuriance of life could return there, someday, when enough time had passed. Here even a madman could not be so daft as to waste precious energy holding onto such a hope. This land has been dead, and is dead, and will always be dead.

Just sand, sun, and silent skeletons of Tevinter's unforgotten but irrelevant flourishing to see. At least soft bits of organic remains didn't linger long. A campsite they passed stank like shit but would be sun-bleached in not so many days. If and when they returned this way it was something to look forward to.

Though, truth be told, there wasn't an utter absence of living creatures. There just wasn't anything close to what she would call flourishing. Just as it is now for the empire that once extended here, for the creatures that remain in this place, there are only other scavengers and detritus to scrounge a living from. What kind of a life is that?

Whenever she scratched her throat and reached for her waterskin, she repeated to herself that this was not a life at all. This was her firm belief and one of the many reasons she would not become lost here, stranded forever somewhere in shifting restless sands in the memories of those who had known her or loved her. It would be a horrible fate for both them and her.

She remembers that for periods in this part of her journey she experienced what it felt like to truly be grateful to be a mage. What an altering thought it was, to feel chosen and especially favoured—she could understand why Sebastian found chastity even a bit fulfilling. The magic singing under her skin was a blessing, not a curse, it seemed hard to believe that she could ever have thought it so, this gift was a hidden spring she could tap at any time for coolness in the form of shards of ice summoned into shadowy crevices and places streaked with cracking layers of salt. Magic as relief was a wonder, but, out here, with such exacting demands put upon her being, not enough. She rubbed and rubbed and irritated her skin and at the end of the day realised not once had she stopped to relieve herself. No one had. Not even the amiable Qunari, whom she imagined drinking and pissing like a horse in almost any other circumstance.

She thought he was a nice person and that he, like anyone else, even her most wretched enemy, didn't deserve this, though perhaps her sympathy was misplaced. It was entirely possible that he had an affinity for these kind of conditions, one that she wouldn't or couldn't ever understand, as someone mostly bred in a place where frost was permanently under the ground and ice had relentlessly carved out a landscape stunning in its impractical beauty. Her toes had tread that ground and her mind had been afflicted by those sharp vistas.

She of course didn't die in the Western Approach. It may have been one of the most dangerous and indifferent places she has ever been, but it was not where she was to meet her end, or any end. The journey had continued. This she knows because it _isn't where she is now._ No, the Western Approach is dry, not moist, and hot, not warm.

She hadn't died there. Which is just as well, because she can't imagine what Fenris would have said of her. Maybe he would have joked. Darkly, to Varric, or someone just as close and understanding—Aveline, Isabela, Donnic, Sebastian, it was possible, she knew he had more than her in his life. He could have said, could have shared this thought, what a bit of meaningless irony, I was born in a hot place and she went to one to die.

Why, Hawke, why, he would ask. Again and again to himself and maybe once to someone else when he finally got drunk enough.

As if she, when dead, could provide him any kind of an answer. (Whether good or bad or just not enough he would have undoubtedly taken it anyway.)

She would have, if she could have, smiled if he cursed her lily-white skin Fereldan skin.

.

 

Lilies.

Not yet, she asks the darkness. There are better places to go.

.

 

Partially, she returns, because loud banging crazily disturbs the already battered surface, but she is not quite able to breech the membrane that's being so violently handled. It isn't gauzy or smooth but gnarled and hardening and thicker than she ever could have imagined. Through it, it's hard to perceive the ghosts which are crowding in around her under the cover of this cacophony of outside chaos.

At least, she realises, it is cooler than whatever she had before. That's something.

And something else: a single word that's short and loaded with too much for one meagre syllable to bear. She grunts out of sympathy for the word, she cannot fathom how anyone could expect her name to carry so much meaning.

_Give it a rest._

.

 

The next thing she's properly aware of is being in Ferelden. She's not young any longer. But that doesn't matter, apparently, as both of her slumbering siblings are fresh as the dew there will be in the morning. She doesn't need much light to see this; the flickering of a guttering fire downstairs is enough. Up here in the loft there's nothing to do but lay her head down and dream with one twin on either side of her.

Yes. This is how they used to sleep. Had she ever watched them while they were away in the Fade?

She tries to remember, and can't, and figures in the end that it's unlikely. Back then she did have her nightmares but they weren't just her own. What threatened them wasn't solely her responsibility. The Templars finding them would tear her entire family apart but, a part of her hoped, even in such a dire situation, there might be one or two persistent bits of her old life that they could not snuff out. Probably she would end up confined in the same Circle as her sister or father, maybe even both, and then at least they wouldn't need to run anymore.

Utter nonsense. But these are the kinds of ugly thoughts that a fugitive mind feeds itself to find a bit of comfort. When the ground is bad so too are the crops.

Now, though, there's nothing so heinous haunting her as her own past weaknesses and fantasies. Just her siblings, sleeping. They are both eight, added up making sixteen, in her mind a good number, her own age as she remembers once being, they two are together a whole which she always has yearned to be. And they will be whole for at least a decade yet.

So she lets them lie.

She moves silently across the loft over to the stairs. Although this house has been burnt down for years she knows where every single chance to make a disruption was—where she would risk a creak, a slip, or a dump against a sharp edge in the wall, a ridge against which she could have significantly hurt herself had she not always been as observant as her father told her to be. Before the twins were harmed she had pointed it out to her father and he had taken care of it and said by way of apology to his wife something about still getting used to being familiar with every nook and cranny in a house. That was something new even to him.

Home—that wasn't a word they used about this place at first. Though, by the time her father was going to leave, it was hard to conceive of it as anything else. This was their home. It was the place where he had, for a few years, the stability of an unremarkable life that by all rights should have been denied him. Such mundanity, simplicity, stillness, a life that had nothing to offer but repetition and sameness without more than a handful of possible but predictable variations. And something like that had been what got him in end—the _common_ cold. It was a prosaic death for a powerful man. Did he regret such a thing?

Hawke, moving forward to go downwards, thinks that she might see if he died with thoughts like these. Or maybe not. Below the loft from which she is descending is a bed in which a parent of hers is facing crisis. Her father died here, in this house, when it was still standing; he died in bed. But theoretically speaking it could just as well be her mother in that bed even if she wasn't the one who ultimately perished. None of this should exist in the first place, so why not?

Truthfully, she can't correctly recall even the name of the place where this really happened.

It was her, Hawke, Marian Hawke, not Malcolm Hawke, who was there when Leandra had almost died in childbirth. It's a painful memory that now strangely steals the breath from Hawke's very body, the air from the entire room—why has sympathy robbed her so suddenly?

Hawke isn't sure, but she gasps and sputters and coughs out an apology for what she knows is about to happen.

She can't breathe.

.

She smells lilies. No breath yet, but you don't always need to inhale to know what scent will invade your nasal cavities. Even with the vastness of a calm grey ocean and a heavy iron sky stretching horizon to horizon before her she does not expect to smell anything else.

And her mother is so pale. No sun, no glow, just the whiteness of the dead before the purity is ruined by the encroaching corruption.

“Mother,” Hawke croaks out. She breathes ragged and air drags in and out of her lungs but she's still deficient in so many ways. Moisture collects in the edges of her eyes and begins clouding her vision and it is cruel, almost too cruel, it's been so long since she last saw her mother so clearly. Hawke hesitates. Her mother may not have liked such things in life but she's dead so in some ways she really doesn't get a say—Hawke ignores decorum and reaches for her mother and draws her close until she's choking on the scent of lilies.

“I'm sorry,” she says again.

“You should be, my child.”

“Yes.”

Although she isn't real this Leandra is real enough to behave exactly as Hawke fears she might. There's no outright rejection, just barbs of blame tossed her way for her to trip on. Even the shade of her mother doesn't embrace her. She takes a step away and once more Hawke has failed to convince herself of her mother's love; nothing new has happened.

Under her own pale skin Hawke feels emptied out. It's just as intangible, though much kinder, and simpler, than the radiant heat that had nearly obliterated her. “It's not an easy pain,” Hawke says to her mother. “I can't believe how much it hurts to give life.”

“Yes. They say the second time is easier. And usually it is, my child.”

Leandra, of course, had almost died when being delivered of the twins. That wasn't how it was supposed to be. Malcolm had done his best to be sure it went better than the first time and even this effort wasn't enough; he had had to deliver their firstborn alone, a near disaster, so they had gone out of their way to settle long enough for her to have a place of relative safety. Just then they had yet to see how badly everything would turn out. Besides an imperilled mother, it would emerge that their oldest child was tainted by magic despite years of both parents' fervent wishes. Later, though they knew better, they each suspected him a jinx in the deeper and lonelier parts of the night.

And that was only one aspect of the disaster. The doctor had delivered Carver and he had been fine and healthy and average—a perfect baby, no burden, already a light to his parents, so easy the doctor decided he wouldn't stay the night and the father could, if he would be so kind, take him back to the village.

No-one was there but the eldest daughter and a dozing newborn who would soon be screaming in competition with his mother to be heeded by _someone_. Already magic had cursed the family and harried them all the way to the very peripheries of life where they had to crouch for safety. So there was no neighbour to hear, no neighbour to help. They had planned to be gone as soon as the mother could safely walk.

“I'm sorry, mother,” Hawke says.

Leandra looks away; the waves on the shore bulge inwards slowly and then suck hissingly away as they drag backwards across the miles of shingle in either direction.

Marian had had to help her mother. She was scared, unsure of herself, just a child with no idea of what could happen—so typical in this kind of story, from what she understands, and has been told by those who were turned over to the Circle.

It was a bad situation and she made it worse by happening to have magic. A spirit was lured by the tragedy and Leandra was kept alive until Malcolm made it back to the wretched scene he never would have expected to be unfolding in his absence. What he had seen when he crossed that threshold, Hawke is not exactly sure. She can't quite recall it, and she's never been able to reconstruct her shaky memories with the help of others because no-one who was there has ever been able to talk about it for good reasons. Maybe if she found the spirit again she could—ask, at least. Maybe, if she were ever so inclined. And didn't know better.

But what she sees now is this: an impossible mixture of day and night, violet creeping up behind the jagged mountains, her mother's twisted body held still in stasis by a shimmering lace of sentient light. Marian's head is on her mother's knee. Carver is there and can be heard but can't be seen. What is the second most striking thing after the state of her mother is the bright brilliant blood that's far too present as it even then continues to spread. That must have been what her father saw—his wife's life staining the sheets. For a few seconds he wouldn't have known that it wasn't too late.

Such despair, she imagines. Enough to stop a heart and stall any action.

Was it that bad when he realised next why they had a merciful visitor from the Fade?

There would be despair over Bethany when her misfortune became known, but Hawke remembers _that_ , and so she knows for sure that, while things were tense for a time afterwards, this particular despair evidently had some precedent and, in some ways, was expected. They already had practise with disappointment of their greatest hopes. Hawke had, even if she doesn't remember, prepared them for that.

“It wasn't your fault,” Leandra says now to a foreign surf. This place, as Hawke remembers it, is somewhere in Ferelden. At least it's a land where her mother made a home despite anything else that may occupy Hawke's childhood memories, though she knows it would be disingenuous to say that this was a place where her mother experienced a sense of true belonging. Perhaps peace, but that can be found anywhere if you're happy enough.

“I know,” Hawke says, “but that doesn't make it any better.”

Leandra nods. She turns to her child and points to something over her shoulder that's well beyond her reach. Leandra's insistent—but Hawke takes a moment. This is her opportunity, she isn't sure she'll see her mother with such lucidity ever again. And here, on this beach, she has more control than she normally would dare to hope for in a dream; she's starting to understand this, that maybe she has some choice after all. Like reliving the trauma she understands how to be haunted by, rather than facing the routine course of nature that carried away her father.

She moves closer, hugs her mother, shuts her eyes and waits.

The scent of lilies is gone.

.

This is a different beach. She's in another place—much closer to where she should be, she can even name some of the shipwrecks she sees. Large clouds crowd out the horizon but the greenish sea glimmers with gold and silver scales. Around here are more than a dozen slavers' caverns she has personally cleaned out with a great sense of duty and enjoyment that even now lingers pleasantly like warmth on her skin. Such evil bones snap so nicely.

This is a familiar place, and she's not alone. She knows who stands behind her.

“So this is what you call the south coast, eh? Maybe one day we can go further south yet,” she proposes.

“Maybe,” he says. Then, “I'd like that.”

She releases air and it sounds like a laugh—when did she start breathing again? She's not sure but she isn't complaining. “No you wouldn't. It'd be too cold for you.”

“So let's go in the summer. Some day.”

She goes to turn around and is too late. Fenris has her from behind, his head on her shoulder, his arms locked securely over her stomach so that she cannot squirm away and try to initiate games. He knows how much she likes to challenge him and his hold to see which one of them can best assert themselves in that moment. It's a challenge he often welcomes and finds rewarding, but not now, apparently.

In some ways, she's grateful for this. She twists her neck and buries her nose in his ghostly hair, his clean scent. Her fingers seek out his exposed pulse. There are so many signs that he's alive. She remains still and silent and unsure of what else she could possibly need to be happy. Then, of course, she has to wonder, where is the rest of herself? Where is the rest of him? He's normally so tightly controlled but there's something missing, something vital, something she knows she appreciates—a vivacity expressed by the choice to be so calm, perhaps. He can resemble a tree at times but even the stoutest trunk can tremble in the wind.

She feels him shift, and he's strong, but there's no threat lurking in such a strength that so saliently lacks a passion. The flame is gone, there's no danger of a flaring that could overwhelm and consume her very heart. Once she punched out a Qunari when under attack; he wasn't there when it happened, but he still believed her, and still he could more than easily contain her if he had the desire to do so. He had the means to overpower her, and sometimes the will to do so because she liked how small it made her feel to be so completely contained within his sinuous grasp.

But, here, there's no trace of such a spark of life. He's entirely dependent upon her.

“Why are you so sad, Fenris?”

His answer is a long time coming. She deserves to stew, though, and she already knows what he'll say, that she's responsible for taking his air, that she's responsible for stealing away a source of his happiness.

“You won't let me help you survive.”

“Fenris...”

“It's your decision, Hawke, but that doesn't meant it should be. Or that you aren't an ass. Really, when have you ever had all the answers?”

She can't remember what else she was supposed to regret. Something about her own life? Maybe something about what remains of it. In any case something too much for her alone.

 

**…**

 

iv.

 

Hawke didn't take the potion. Nor was it given to her. She may find it incredible to believe later, but in fact nothing of what she has experienced in the last two days is anything but what's inside of herself. It's all under the heavy haze of a fever, of course, but there's no drug-induced miasma, no foreign uncertainties introduced, just the amplified echoes of her own actions and choices when her mind could contain nothing else.

The midwife hasn't left the room yet. No-one has come in, and only one, Merrill, has left. There has been no exchange with, no yielding to, the outside world according to the mother's wishes, but now the woman is beginning to wonder about how best to proceed. There are three in this room and, at best, she sees two leaving in the near future, only one if something is not done soon.

She's thinking of finally calling someone when the mother breaks through with a fitful urgency, eyes blazing with life. She grabs at the woman without mercy and drags her close like a raft in a deadly storm. Before anything can be asked of her Hawke is rattling off whatever she has found and emerged necessarily to share.

“Get Fenris. He can get under my skin. He can turn the baby before it suffocates—”

She's out again, and that's dangerous to both mother and child, but, if what she say is true, the midwife has an understanding that it's okay to hope for a good resolution after all.

.

The next thing Hawke knows is the weight of her own skin. Its weight is immense and its surface expansive. There are scars and nicks and scratches, some deposits of sweat, and even some wrinkles, though she would deny knowing exactly how many are exactly where. Such things remind her of all the years that have come and gone and the desolate feeling which that can bring. They weren't empty years, to be sure, but there was so much more lost than gained in the span of them. Why, she wonders, bother dwelling on such pain. Her legacy is already what it is, but Kirkwall, and its people, deserve better than what she has been able to give. Fear and suffering aren't things which should be accepted, especially not as gifts.

As for herself, she's learnt to take what she can get.

Like the lightness of her chest. When she inhales her chest expands completely, dried sweat flakes under her breast, but she's allowed the full range of her own motions. And she's a reasonable temperature.

It's glorious.

“Hawke?”

A hoarse voice calls to her and just hearing it gives her a detailed image of how tired this person must be. Haggard, with deeply black ring under the stunning eyes, but there's also a lilt she hears that conveys the profound pleasure of a hard-won triumph. And a retrieval of what was thought to be potentially or probably lost. This lilt is something new and related to her.

She breathes out, and he's standing by her side, then sitting by her side by the time she opens her eyes to the darkness of her bedroom. She reaches for him and exhaustion weaves its way across her skin, impeding her movements like thick cobwebs. Luckily he as ever extends himself for her without question and soon she's settled against his chest. His heart is beating and it tells her, as she nestles closer, here I am, here I am, here I am.

Dizzily she leans back from him when she feels him shifting to get a better look at her. She would pull back but her body protests and its case against her is a solid one: it's raw, battered, used, practically abused, safe, but tired. Neither it nor he want her to exert it, so she lets him support her with a sigh of resignation, a small bit of her humour making an insistent burst of presence.

It's quickly forgotten, however, when she sees the way he looks at her. She swallows around the words that are already half-way out of her throat. “I'm sorry. I didn't think—”

“Clearly.” His hands on her back squeeze down. Hawke touches his face, her fingers trembling gently, her thumb traces along the evident lines of his cheek. His skin is smooth but faintly dry, like fine paper, and she wonders how long it is that he's been up. Three days would leave anyone frayed. One finger passes close beneath his eye and there his skin is startlingly rubbery. He captures her hand with his and places it on his lower lip.

“I thought it would be all right.”

“Because it always is when you decide to do something on your own.”

“No. Okay. Not all right—but better than what it is was. Fenris, I—“ She looks away for a moment, and the shadows dance because of the fire, but she can _nearly_  see them shifting in a pattern that they aren't, and can't, along walls that haven't been anything but ashes for so long. Moments such as these do not have a name but whatever the content or context the way they feel is always the same—suddenly you're nowhere or everywhere, and something could be decided, or maybe it won't be, shade has clustered around the painfully bright edges of your vision. There's a choice to be made and maybe it's yours to make. Familiar surroundings overlap and recall others but it's hard to actually confuse this place for another you remember. Only when you're ascending from or descending into the borderlands near sleep, when the brightness dims and the shadows are allowed to advance, and uncertainty begins to sprawl unheeded, can you truly forget where you are.

And, right now, she's tired but she is awake. She has a good idea of what she's about.

“I was afraid. What if this child, our child, what if it's cursed by my blood?”

He understands what she means, obviously. He goes stiff against her and she thinks that he'll never be able to relax again—he had cared for her so much he had failed to contemplate the very real possibility that she could pass along what she harboured within her, the black temptation that she has overcome but so many have succumbed to. He has somehow been fooled by his own overbearing love.

But she's wrong. He hasn't been fooled by anything. He's not so easily had, not by anyone, including himself. And he is really here with her, his touch summoning dually chills and sparks in her.

“Our daughter,” he whispers into the shell of her ear. The silence that follows roars loudly with meaning as she begins to properly catch up with him. This is a fulfilment, here is a change. A promise has been kept. As she knows, has been told by someone who is only to believed, nothing is more powerful than a promise kept, even an unspoken one. But now she has an image in her head and the possibility of the curse is that much more captivatingly lucid—she sees a girl like herself, young, scared, and stressed, with no idea of the contamination about to expose itself in her.

“Our daughter,” she repeats, just a breath louder than him. “What if she gets my magic?”

She uses a softer word because his hands are in her hair, holding her head like a sensuous treasure, and this is his daughter too. His eyes trace after hers with every tremble that she makes. Very carefully, she cradles her fingers around the delicate shape of his ear.

“Then that will be one of the many things she may inherit from you.”

In answer, she smiles. Wearily, sure, but her mouth splits into a grin as easily as clouds part for the sun. She's not comforted completely yet. There's no telling what the future may hold—whether the answer is yes or no, what trials will follow either way, if the child is even healthy or not. Other things can happen too: famine, storms, fire, the sundering of the Veil. She—but not he, she already knows this from the way he handles her—could end up being a bad parent. Pride and impatience have made her fail before even when the situation was momentous.

But, at least for now, she is content.

“So what has she definitely inherited from me?”

“Would you like to see for yourself?”

“Oh, you know, in good time.”

“Of course. Let me get her for you—”

 

**...**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! thank you very much for reading! this is my first forray into material with this ship, so i really hope you might have enjoyed it just a bit. this has been a warm-up for a novella length piece i have planned and outlined; i just need the wherewithal to do it, tbh.


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